Show Notes - Week of April 20, 2020

Greetings from 53.5° north latitude where spring has finally sprung and people are once again able to get outside. Let's hope they stay isolated so that our COVID cases don't spike in a couple weeks. 

The week that was was long and repetitive, with double-digit meetings each work day. The reading was good, as was the guitar playing. If I thought the picture would be clear, I'd take a picture of my left fingertips to show the budding callouses. 

The tl;dr for this week is: Two books finished, four beers drank (three from the previous week), a book discussion recorded and posted on YouTube, and a bunch of new words.

Let's get on with it, shall we?

Reading Pile:
It was a productive week for reading, with two books finished and a new one about one-quarter completed already. 

Book #15 for 2020 was a young reader series mystery that I finished with my younger daughter. "Panda-Monium" by Stuart Gibbs is a first-person narrated story of a middle school sleuth who helps solve the mystery of a missing panda. Teddy Fitzroy is a bit like Encyclopedia Brown, but in a modern setting and in a full-length novel format. The book was really well done and had a couple absolutely hilarious scenes. If you are looking to hook a young reader on the mystery genre, this is a good choice. 

Book #16 for 2020 was "Ancillary Justice" by Anne Leckie, a science fiction story revolving around a multi-millennium old AI hellbent on revenge. It was a great concept, and ultimately it came together really well, but I did lose interest for a while about two-thirds of the way through. To be fair, that might have been a symptom of mental fatigue and quarantine overload. It was definitely good enough to make me seek out the second book in the series. 

Leckie wrote an excellent quote near the end of the novel that could have been equally applicable to today's world.

If you've got power and money and connections, some differences won't change anything. Or if you are resigned to dying in the near future ... It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all. What you call no difference is life and death to them,

I mentioned above that I am already one-quarter through another book. That one is a historical account of some seriously interesting cyrpto work done over 200 years ago. I suspect I'll have a good summary of it done for next week's entry. In the meantime, here is a tweet related to that book.

Thanks to the book "The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes" by @MarkUrban01, I learned that shrapnel is named after a certain Henry Shrapnel who made fragmenting cannon balls in theate 18th century.

There, now you learned something today as well.

— Robert Martin (@robertwmartin) April 25, 2020

Lastly, I have commented multiple times since mid-December about the War and Peace Reddit reading group that I am part of. I highly encourage you to read War and Peace, and if you do, a chapter-a-day reading habit is a great way to do it, especially if you augment it with Brian E. Denton's Daily Meditations on each chapter. 

Denton has been actively lurking on the subreddit this year and invited myself and others to record a session where we talk about Book 1, Part 1. It was a really good discussion, and it was great to put faces to names of some of the most active contributors to the subreddit. The full video is linked below, and a few of my points are linked here [1, 2].

New Beers:
Four new beers for the past fortnight - I didn't feel like posting a beer update last week - and it was a fairly forgettable bunch unfortunately. It started out well with the Collective Arts Hazy State. Collective Arts do like their hazy IPAs. This one was very hazy and never did settle or clear in the slightest. There was a big waft of pine and a nice taste. (3.75 / 5). The next was also from Collective Arts, but this was a bit disappointing. It wasn't bad or poorly done, but just didn't live up to my expectations for a sour from Collective Arts. (3.25 / 5). 

Next was the Wild Beer Company Millionaire Salted Caramel Chocolate Milk Stout. This had a nice boozy flavor without being overpowering, but I didn't taste much of the salted caramel or chocolate. (3.25 / 5).

Last up was the Lech Premium Pale Lager. When you are on a personal quest to drink one of every beer in the world like I am, you will eventually have to drink benign lagers from  big macro breweries, and this was one of those times. This was decent, but wholly unremarkable. That's all I am going to say. (3.0 / 5)

New Words:
Quite a few words this week, with a couple being repeat offenders.

shabrack
[ˈSHabˌrak]
NOUN
historical

1. a cavalry saddlecloth used in European armies.

antipathetic
[anˌtipəˈTHedik]
ADJECTIVE

1. showing or feeling a strong aversion.

sobriquet
[ˈsōbrəˌkā, ˈsōbrəˌket]
NOUN

1. a person's nickname.

perfidy
[ˈpərfədē]
NOUN
literary

1. deceitfulness; untrustworthiness.

epistemic
[ˌepəˈstemik, ˌepəˈstēmik]
ADJECTIVE

1. relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.

inveterate
[inˈvedərət]
ADJECTIVE

1. having a particular habit, activity, or interest that is long-established and unlikely to change.

anthropoid
[ˈanTHrəˌpoid]
ADJECTIVE

1. resembling a human being in form.
   

NOUN (zoology)

1. a higher primate, especially an ape or apeman.

somnolent
[ˈsämnələnt]
ADJECTIVE

1. sleepy; drowsy.

extirpate
[ˈekstərˌpāt]
VERB

1. root out and destroy completely.

bluestocking
[ˈblo͞oˌstäkiNG]
NOUN
derogatory

1. an intellectual or literary woman.

newel
[ˈnü-əl  , ˈnyü- ]
NOUN

1. an upright post about which the steps of a circular staircase wind
   
2. a post at the foot of a straight stairway or one at a landing

antiphonal
[ˌanˈtifən(ə)l]
ADJECTIVE

1. (in traditional Western Christian liturgy) (of a short sentence or its musical setting) sung, recited, or played alternately by two groups.